A record number of sole proprietorships closed in Ukraine: why and where (map)
7 January 17:25
The past year of 2024 was a record year for Ukrainian sole proprietorships in terms of the number of closures. This is evidenced by statistics published by the YouControl system, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
The increase in the closure of individual entrepreneurs amounted to 54% compared to the same period in 2023. This means that almost 92 thousand individual entrepreneurs have closed in Ukraine.
Most entrepreneurs closed in May and January – more than 16 thousand each month.
Most sole proprietors closed in the capital last year – more than 12 thousand. In Kharkiv, 5.3 thousand ceased operations, 3.8 thousand in Odesa, 3.3 thousand in Dnipro, and 2.8 thousand in Lviv.
Among the communities, the leaders with the highest number of closed sole proprietorships were: Kryvyi Rih (Dnipro region) – 1,400, Kremenchuk (Poltava region) – 780, and Bila Tserkva (Kyiv region) – almost 600.
Compared to the previous year, Ukrainians were most active in liquidating sole proprietorships in Chernihiv, Kirovohrad, Khmelnytsky, Chernivtsi, and Ternopil regions.
The largest number of sole proprietorships were closed in the retail trade sectors – more than 29 thousand (an increase in closures compared to 2023 was 44.8%), information technology – almost 16 thousand (65.9%), and other services – 9.7 thousand (60.8%).
As Roman Kornyliuk, financial analyst at YouControl, explains, the trend of increasing business closures is not always an indication of exclusively negative trends in the country’s economic life.
“Firstly, the increase in closures occurs against the backdrop of an increase in the number of registrations of new companies and individual entrepreneurs, which means that this all together indicates the intensification of business life in the third year of a full-scale war. Secondly, in 2022 and partly in 2023, business owners and sole proprietors often did not have time to legally formalize the closure of their businesses, even if business activity was de facto curtailed. Therefore, some of the requests for closure and termination in 2024 are a “pent-up demand” for legalization of business termination, which actually arose earlier,” the expert explained.
